Del LaGrace Volcano, self-styled “part time gender terrorist”, was to be profiled at London’s Whitechapel Gallery next week. The event has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, but his [I shall say his for clarity] art has never been more relevant.
The Queer and Trans community has gained unprecedented visibility in recent years, from TV documentaries on children having sex-change operations to even “Big Brother”’s Nadia, and the popularity of gender bending, dragging and androgyny, has reached new heights. Discovering Volcano’s art for me was like discovering the personification of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Here was an educated and progressive feminism, being manifested into culture.
Volcano’s portfolio consists mainly of photography, but also performance art and published writings, predominantly focused around “accessing the ‘technologies of gender”. This is not the body as we know it. Volcano does not believe in the idea of the body beautiful, yet still manages to produce some undeniably beautiful photos. I love his work because it provocatively confronts and unapologetically challenges mainstream culture’s perceived notions of sex and gender and the polarities imposed by conventions of femininity and masculinity. Here, the ambiguous body is no longer forced to fit into labels it does not need, instead the queer body is celebrated and resists the constraints put on it by oppressive conventions.
Volcano shows us that all bodies can be queer bodies. In his self-portraits, Del can be seen sporting a tutu teamed with facial hair, wearing lipstick while flexing his muscles, all with the purpose of challenging hegemonic, heteronormativity.
This egalitarian art gives new meaning to that old cliché ‘the personal is political’ and welcomes you to question your own feminism.
Check out his art here.